Joyce's Araby
The Explicator; Washington; Winter 1994; Coulthard, A
R

Volume:
52
Issue:
2
Start Page:
97
ISSN:
00144940
Subject Terms:
Short stories
Literary criticism
Personal Names:
Joyce, James (1882-1941)

The consensus interpretation of James Joyce's "Araby"
is that it is an initiation story recounting a young
romantic's first bitter taste of reality. John Brugaletta
and Mary Hayden express the typical view of the boy:

He has been attracted by the "magical name" of the
bazaar and has travelled there for the greater glory of
that other magical name, the name which springs to
his lips in prayers and praises. The vision had been his
alternative to the real world, had indeed become at
one point so realistic as to apparently fuse with reality
for him. But that vision ... proved too fragile for a world
of real older girls, money, drunken and indifferent
uncles, and the necessary crassness of day-to-day
existence.... Anguish, however intense, is a perfectly
appropriate reaction. (17)

As have most commentators on the story, Brugaletta
and Hayden omit religion from their list of
disenchanting influences and regard "anguish" as the
most important word in the narrator's climactic memory
of his disillusioning boyhood experience: "Gazing up
into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven
and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with
anguish and anger." But the anomalous word "vanity,"
induced by a religious mindset, is the key to the story's
theme. Anguish and anger are merely emotional
reactions, but the admission of vanity, which reflects
the oppressive Catholicism in the story, is a severe
moral judgment. The boy, standing alone in darkened
Araby with his shattered hopes, may well have felt
anguish and anger over his romantic illusions and the
circumstances that thwarted them, but it is the
now-moralistic adult who looks back on his former self
as having been vain in his adolescent desire for
romance and happiness, a perception that would have
been alien to his youthful zeitgeist. This mature
narrator, and not the naive boy, is the story's
protagonist. I do not think Joyce expected reasonable
readers to share his narrator's harsh judgment of
himself, a verdict handed down by the stern priest that
the once dreamy boy has in effect become. The
antagonist of the story is not the hackneyed reality of a
tough world but a repressive Dublin culture, which
renders hopes and dreams not only foolish but sinful.
"Araby" is not a stock initiation story but the
dramatization of a soul-shrivelling Irish asceticism.

The still-sensitive narrator has become embittered
rather than wiser, which was his destiny from the first
for desiring joy in an environment that forbade it. He
describes the Dublin that he grew up in as a
religion-haunted vale of tears. Joyce, no doubt
reflecting his own youthful confinement in Jesuit
boarding schools, has his narrator begin the story by
referring to "the hour when the Christian Brothers'
School set the boys free." But they were "freed" into
an equally grim world where not even play brought
pleasure: "The cold air stung us and we played till our
bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent
streets." The boys gamely tried to frolic among somber
houses, whose "brown imperturbable faces" seemed
"conscious of decent lives within them," an image that
expresses, with a note of irony, a bond between
decency and a constricted life in the mind of
Dubliners.

When the narrator was not learning asceticism at
school or in the streets, he was learning it at home. He
vividly recalls that the former tenant of the house he
grew up in, "a priest, had died in the back
drawing-room." Another image of repression is
afforded by "Air, musty from having been long
enclosed," this one more closely linked with religious
devotion. In "the waste room," which has its own
pointed meaning, the boy found three books. Two of
them suggest that the priest attempted to lighten the
load of the Catholic discipline signified by the third,
The Devout Communicant, a pamphlet by a
Franciscan friar. Sir Walter Scott's The Abbot would
have added a bit of historical romance to the priest's
drab profession, and The Memoirs of Vidocq, the
autobiography of a French policeman and soldier of
fortune, would have provided vicarious escape from it.
As the boy was soon to do, the priest apparently made
his own, albeit mild, protest against the austere life.
But the narrator quietly underscores the loneliness of
the churchman by mentioning that he had no one to
leave his worldly possessions to except institutions and
his sister.

The lesson that romance and morality are antithetical,
whether learned from haunting celibates or breathed in
with the chastising Dublin air, has not been lost on the
narrator. When he was a boy, his sexuality played a
part in his obsession with Mangan's sister, and it is
now a factor in his harsh assessment of his youthful
behavior. As the narrator at least subconsciously
realizes, his devotion to the older girl was not nearly as
innocent as his sentimental, "O love! O love!" might
seem. Opposing his idealization of Mangan's sister ("I
imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a
throng of foes") are many fleshly memories of her.
Most critics have regarded the girl, whom the narrator
even now will not call by name, as his adolescent
dream-object, but such visions as "Her dress swung as
she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair
tossed from side to side" are neither ethereal nor
platonic. He can still see "her figure defined by the
light from the half-opened door," and from their one
brief encounter he has retained a vision of "the white
curve of her neck" and "the white border of a petticoat
just visible." He also recalls that as he made his
love-pledge of a gift from Araby, the girl stood
clutching one of the spikes of a railing, which would be
an odd memory were it not so plainly phallic. That the
narrator's "confused adoration" of his first love was
tainted by latent lust is now a strong influence on his
abashed sense of vanity. With his final, disgusted
pronouncement, the reformed sensualist dismisses all
such secular attempts to live life with pleasure as base
self-indulgence and therefore worthy of the derision of
decent people, among whom he now numbers himself.

The boy's quest for the girl was, of course, doomed
from the start. The real story of "Araby," however, is
not what happened to the boy but what has happened
to the man. The repression of spirit that he attempted
to escape as a youth has imprisoned him as an adult.
He now knows that dark is right and no longer believes
in beacons of hope, feminine or otherwise. He has not
been defeated by a shabby bazaar, or even by reality
in the absolute sense, but by the temporal gloom
blanketing the Dublin of his youth like the snow of the
dead. A religiosity that assumes that life is painful and
meant to be that way has seeped into his soul. He has
come to accept as just a life in which children play in
joyless streets, girls cannot attend bazaars because of
convent duties, old ladies collect used stamps for
pious purposes, aunts mark time as "this night of Our
Lord," and even drunken uncles cannot resist
moralizing--"The people are in bed and after their first
sleep now"--to pleasure-seekers such as the boy. In
Dublin, any deathly silence is "like that which pervades
a church after a service," and a virtuous, imperturbable
face is the only defense.

Surely the refugee from such paralysis who wrote
"Araby" wanted his readers to see the disillusioned
adult moralist who narrates the story, and not the
dreamy young sensualist he once was, as the story's
object of pity.

--A. R. COULTHARD, Appalachian State University

WORK CITED

Brugaletta, John J., and Mary H. Hayden. "The
Motivation for Anguish in Joyce's 'Araby.'" Studies in
Short Fiction 15 (winter 1978): 11-17.